What is your Primary Identity?

The Borders of Baptism:

Identities, Allegiances, and the Church

What is your primary identity? Are you an American — or Canadian, Nicaraguan, or Texan first and foremost? Are you a mother, father, or daughter first? A Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian? Or does your faith inform your identity more than any of these allegiances? In The Borders of Baptism, professor of political science and Catholic studies at DePaul University Michael L. Budde explores this question from a wide variety of angles. What if, he asks, the identity-forming power we give to the state were reserved for the Body of Christ?

When those of us interested in church history think of Nazi Germany, our minds typically jump to the good work of Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church movement. However, we typically know less about the theological movements that reinforced Nazi ideology in German churches. In her recent book, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and The Bible in Nazi Germany (which has just been released in paperback by Princeton University Press), Susannah Heschel narrates the history of the primary catalyst of such errant theology, the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Heschel, professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and daughter of renowned Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel, describes here not only the organizational history of the Institute, but also their work in rewriting Bible in a way that eliminated as many Jewish elements of its story as possible, and also revising the hymnal and liturgy of the German churches in a similar fashion. In the book’s introduction Heschel pointedly summarizes the mission of the Institute:

[The] Institute redefined Christianity as a Germanic religion whose founder, Jesus, was no Jew but rather had fought valiantly to destroy Judaism, falling as victim to that struggle. Germans were now called upon to be the victors in Jesus’s own struggle against the Jews, who were said to be seeking Germany’s destruction (1).